Monthly Archives: December 2012

So this thing’s been around since the dawn of time itself, before Creation itself… circa 1991-1994. Doesn’t matter though. The Suitcase Car

was first produced in Japan in 1991 as part of a contest held at Mazda’s Engineering department. The idea was simply to have a 3-wheeled car inside a suitcase. The original suitcase car was destroyed in a car park just a few months after it was built but the vehicle was rebuilt in a black suitcase in 1994. (The original case being red)

Powered by a 40cc two stroke engine the vehicle holds enough fuel for around two hours of driving at speeds up to 27 mph. It is built around a small steel chassis and is steered by handlebars. It also includes head lamps for night time driving and functional brake lights and indicators to warn other road users of your actions.

No, no, you don’t get to buy one. You just get to think “Huh! Would you look at that! A car in a suitcase.” And then you go on with your day, obsessively revisiting OhGizmo for updates.

After last week’s glorious Sunblades, I’m beginning to think that people are trying hard to make some serious stabs at Royal Douchebaggery. Take these belt buckles for instance.

They’re made by NESBuckle and allegedly aimed at geeks with very fond memories of their controllers. They originally made the NES Buckle, and must have met with some serious success (they got tons of press, I don’t get it!) as they’re now expanding the line to cover the SNES, the XBOX, the Sega Genesis and even the Atari controllers.

So if you want to walk around, loudly proclaiming “I’ve no regard for fashion conventions and will walk naked, dressed in geek, uber-nerdo that I am!”, then $30 to $50 should be enough to do the trick. Right here. Story VIA Bit-tech.
Thanks, Asim

Being sick sucks. It’s the bane of many of the elderly however, and sadly, there’s less and less space for them in hospitals. They get sent home all the time, even when medical attention is still needed, with their fingers crossed in the hopes that all of their body parts will stay on while there’s no one around to help.

This thought probably didn’t sit too well with Israeli-based Tadiran Spectralink, makers of (somewhat ironically) various war-related products: Advanced Data Links for Guided Weapons Systems, UAV data-links, etc. This data-linking experience is precisely what’s made them suited to produce a wristwatch-like device, called the MDKeeper.

It’s designed to be worn by the elderly, or at-risk patients, chronically ill patients and people requiring nursing care. It monitors patients’ pulse, cardiac rhythm and blood oxygen values without inconveniencing them, stores the data on a chip and then transmits it in real time or as needed over the GSM/GPRS network to a medical center. It’s a little like a nurse’s monitoring station, except the patient is miles away.

Some of the more adventurous computer-bound urbanites actually like get up sometimes, and travel. Such travel will sometimes take you to harshly inhospitable places. Places that may, for instance, have no hangers handy for you to, well, to hang your clothes on. Well, with the “Redefine Form” hanger, designed by Wieszak Skladany for Osika Design, you’ll be able to show all the natives just how much style you’ve got.

The beauty of its design is pretty self-explanatory… however, in the somewhat unlikely case that you’ve visually challenged, just know that it’s a hanger that collapses on itself for easy travel storage, and smartly folds out to wield a fully-functioning, er, hanger.

As most such things designy, price is a Purple People Eater. Visit the site here. Story VIA Productdose.

Update: Thanks to Mark, in the comment section, we learn that Wieszak Skladany means “Folding Hanger” in Polish, and thus not a name at all. See, this is why we have readers. Thanks Mark.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: technology is a laziness facilitator, with the ultimate goal of turning us into immobile blobs who control everything around them with minimal movement. That being said, the StarSeeker Chair from Bigha should be on any star gazer’s wish list, if only for the geek factor.

See, 2,000 clams will buy you a very cool, joystick-controlled motorized reclining chair with special binocular holders. All you have to do is take it outside, park your hopefully not yet horribly distended rump, and look up at the shiny dots. Don’t like that particular piece of sky? Press a knob and the chair will point you in another direction.

Informational parenthetical: quite simply put, refrigerators work by extracting heat from the air inside them and putting it outside. That’s why the back of your fridge is hot. Until now, that heat’s been wasted. Well, with the Hot Fridge, a creation of Hae-jin Kim, you could conceivably give your fridge dual use and keep things hot, as well as cold. It would do this by placing the “back of the fridge”, on top, where a special hot food storage compartment would be placed.

Now that you have discovered the Usenet and BitTorrent, what are you to do with all of those DVD’s you will want to store for future use? We all know what a nightmare unprotected DVD’s can become when you go to your porn movie library only to find your favourite DVD is ruined because you stored it incorrectly. Your new best friend should be the Playo Ejector by ABCron.

It’s a case, within which the disc is held in suspended storage and is ejected halfway out by pressing the ejector trigger. The suspended storage and ergonomic extraction method guarantee the best possible protection of your stored data. The ejector disc protector is lightweight, highly transparent, and extremely resistant and secure against damage.

I just couldn’t resist posting about this. It’s a slingshot with laser guidance, the secret of which lays within its dual offset pivoting system. This system is able to precisely align a laser or sight to the trajectory of the fired projectile. This revolutionary breakthrough allows the Laser Slingshot to precisely split pencils at 20 feet, hit cans as far as 150 feet, and hit flying targets with a shotgun spray of BBs (with optional add-on shotgun pouch).

I was a slingshot nut as a kid, and I would have peed my pants in frustration at the thought of my parents inevitably refusing to buy this for me. So maybe it’s better that I’m all growed up, cause now, with $50, I can buy me my own. And by Jumping Jehosaphat, I will! Right here. Story VIA DoubleViking.

OhGizmo! is a frequently updated blog that focuses on covering items that will appeal to a very specific and often very passionate audience: the geek. Aside from the fare of innovative consumer electronic products, the reader can expect to find news about geek culture, absurd inventions, awe inspiring technology, and an ever growing assortment of articles that we like to think fit within our view of what we’re calling the Geek Lifestyle.